Self-organized structures (e.g., networks) have gained tremendous popularity over recent years, and such networks poses a significant challenge as to understanding respective constructs thereof. The networks (e.g., the Internet, world wide web, various social networks . . . ) can be very different from each other, but they all typically share a commonality in that their structures are not engineered, but rather are a result of dynamic non-Markovian processes of individual decisions. Understanding the respective structures of these networks can facilitate enabling modeling of as well as searching the networks effectively—the greatest success thus far has been in searching the world wide web, which has now become a primary repository of information and/or misinformation.
Internet newsgroups (e.g., Usenet) is another large network intermediate to the Internet and social networks. Usenet, the network of topic-oriented newsgroups on the Internet, comprises tens of thousands of newsgroups and hundreds of millions of postings by millions of authors throughout the world. Some basic workings of Usenet are as follows: each of over fifty thousand newsgroups has a unique name, with the name grouped into trees—some of the more common roots of these trees include alt., biz., and rec. Within a newsgroup, the messages are organized as threads. Each message is typically generated by a single author; individuals may author more than one message along a thread. Each thread originates in a single message with a subject heading usually reflecting the content of the message; later messages in the thread, of which there can be thousands, are posted as responses to the original message. Any message along a thread can be cross-posted (e.g., by its author) to any number of additional newsgroups.
Newsgroups facilitate transfer of information and ideas on topics specific to each individual newsgroup. For example, a user interested in gaining travel tips prior to traveling to a country (e.g., Africa) can enter a newsgroup specifically created and operated to discuss such information (rec.travel.africa). There are currently thousands of newsgroups that cover nearly every topic imaginable. When properly utilized, newsgroups can provide for a user to submit highly specific queries and obtain answers thereto, wherein oftentimes such answers are only available from a very limited set of disparate individuals or entities.
Presently, however, it is difficult to quickly locate a particular newsgroup relevant to a specific topic of desire. Even if a newsgroup, that appears to be on-point to a topic, is located by a user, such a newsgroup may not be currently active or may comprise information not germane to the particular topic of interest—thus, not really being on-point. Internet search engines are typically employed to locate newsgroup(s) which relate to information or discussion for a particular topic of interest. However, oftentimes, the search engines return newsgroups with low precision (e.g., non-relevant), due in part to such engines being primarily limited to employment of textual-based searching schemes. For example, if a user desires to join a newsgroup that discusses travel to Africa and enters keywords “travel” and “Africa” to a search engine, he/she may receive an exact desired newsgroup, but the search engine may just as likely return newsgroups focusing on irrelevant respective content (e.g., sports, politics . . . ).
Undesirable results can occur because a conventional search engine typically only ranks the newsgroups based on some pre-determined criteria. The search engine may rank newsgroups according to number of times that both “Africa” and “travel” appear in discussion of the newsgroups. Therefore, if the discussion in a sports newsgroup and a political newsgroup is focused on a sports figure traveling to Africa and/or a political figure traveling to Africa, respectively, they will be ranked highly when the search engine returns newsgroups from the search query, even though the user has no desire to discuss either sports or politics.
In view of at least the above, there exists a strong need in the art for a system and/or methodology to facilitate improved searching and organization of newsgroups.